With your maps

Place Name Guide is not a navigation app and never will be. It narrates the road as you reach each place; Google Maps or Apple Maps gets you there. The question is how to run both in one car, and the honest answer today is: easily on two phones, and with some care on one.

Two phones: what works everywhere

  1. The guide goes on the phone connected to the car's Bluetooth (or plugged into the stereo), with the screen on and the app in front. Everyone in the car hears it through the car's speakers. The app keeps the screen awake while a drive is running.
  2. The map app goes on the other phone, on its own speaker or a mount. Its prompts and the guide never fight.

This is how we test the guides, and it is what we suggest if you have a passenger with a phone.

One phone: what to expect

Android. Add the guide to your home screen, start the drive, then switch to Google Maps. The guide keeps speaking in the background; when Maps talks, the phone turns the guide down and back up, the same as it does with music. The guide shows on the lock screen and the car's display with pause and skip.

iPhone. Start the drive in Safari or from the home screen and put the phone on the dash with the guide in front; run directions through CarPlay or on a passenger's phone. Apple keeps a web app's sound running only while it is in front, so if you switch to Apple Maps on the same phone the guide can go quiet until you come back. We show the guide on the lock screen and CarPlay with pause and skip, and the phone lowers the guide under a Maps prompt when both are running.

Either way: turn the map app's voice guidance on, put the guide's volume where you want the stories, and let the phone manage the two. Tap Play now on any stop if you missed one.

What we are working toward

We want the guide to behave exactly like music on your phone: playing in the background, ducking for the map's prompts, controllable from the wheel, on one phone, on both platforms. On Android that is largely so now. On the iPhone it needs either Apple allowing web apps to keep sound running in the background, or a small native wrapper around the guide that can. We would rather stay a web app that needs no store and works with no signal, so we are watching the first and preparing the second. When it changes, this page changes.

If you have a car and a phone we should test with, tell us.